Featuring Marie-Josée Poisson, Alison Gadsby, Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, Natalie Southworth
Alison Gadsby, author of Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editons, March 2026)
I am in awe of those who always knew they’d be a writer. As a child, I wrote complete stories in my head, most often while I sat in church praying that I wouldn’t faint (I often fainted in church) but I rarely wrote them down. Of course, I wrote silly limericks and copied out extracts from the encyclopedia (who doesn’t?). If I had something important to say, I’d write it down on this magic-slate-paper-saver toy I got for Christmas one year. I’d use the red plastic pen to write my darkest thoughts and then erase them – all those words – by lifting the film.
I started writing seriously about thirty years ago, as a sketch comic who penned dark skits that made people laugh, likely due to their deep discomfort with the subject matter. A while after I quit comedy, I turned a few of those sketches into stories and joined a writers’ group at the local library. I wrote a new story every week and for the most part, I did nothing with them. I had to get my degree and complete an MFA before I felt confident enough to submit anything I’d written to literary magazines. I was also convinced my first published work would be a novel. But six short years after I graduated, I got my first acceptance letter, and I’ve had a short story or two published every year since.
I wish I could say I had an agenda in placing all the stories together in Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive. That I somehow purposely collected these stories that explore grief, motherhood, childhood trauma, sexual abuse, intrusive thoughts and postpartum depression. That I thought, “let me really get into the trauma and pain that incapacitates me and see what I can come up with”. The truth is, I just put together my favourites of all the weird and wacky stories that started in my head (I still write complete stories in my head) and ended up in my hard drive. It was only when I read them all together, ten years after some were written, that I saw the emotional thread and understood what an editor noticed immediately – these were stories about people who were barely surviving, who barely survived childhood.
I wrote the stories in Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive because I had to. And because I finally had the courage to not erase them, I now have a published collection.
Check out an essay on how long it takes to be a writer on our Patreon!
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Alison Gadsby writes in Tkaronto/Toronto where she lives in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, including Blank Spaces, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, Blue Lake Review and more. She is the founder/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series.
Marie-Josée Poisson, author of Blood Bound (Guernica Editions, March 2026)
I like to think of creative writing as my second career. In a previous professional incarnation, I did write a lot, but it was all commissioned work. Like a painter being asked to use his talent to do a portrait by a patron of the arts.
I did not have to look far for inspiration. It came from my family name when I realized I shared it with a famous — some would say infamous— historical figure: Madame de Pompadour, née Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson. It is common knowledge that she was the official mistress of Louis XV, King of France for nearly 20 years. But I was intrigued: who was behind the refined image, the opulent dresses, the many châteaux she built?
In reading about the woman who became Marquise de Pompadour, I uncovered that she, just like me, had suffered from being named Fish (Poisson). A detail, really, that her political enemies used abundantly to ridicule her, to belittle her growing influence. To me, she was no longer only a history book character, but a person plagued by an inelegant patronym: mine. Of course, we can in no way be related. My first ancestors came to Canada in 1645 and she was born in 1721.
My book, in addition to being a historical novel, proposes a “what-if” scenario.
The reader will uncover, through the search of a modern-day woman for her
roots, how the secrets of one’s past can illuminate another’s quest for self in the
present. Blending genealogy, mystery, and emotional discovery, Blood Bound:
Unlacing Secret Ties invites readers to question what it means to inherit not only
blood, but also destiny. To me, it was cathartic, a way to exorcise a cursed family
name.
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Marie-Josée Poisson spent many years working as a senior level communications professional for various Montreal organizations, including a stint as a magazine editor. She left the communications field to focus on her creative writing and has written three historical novels.
Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, author of The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street: A Memoir (Douglas & McIntyre, March 2026)
This book was born from deep silence. While many people enjoy sharing stories from their childhoods, I’ve always found it extremely difficult to talk about mine. My family’s habitual silence made it impossible for me to describe my liminal existence between cultures, languages, identities, and homes. A sense of ambiguous shame grew out of that silence even as I longed to share my story.
Born in Taiwan, my family immigrated to Canada when I was nine. Three years later, my parents returned to Taiwan to work, leaving my siblings and me to raise ourselves in Vancouver. Overnight, we became an “astronaut family,” visiting one another but never whole again. Fractured by distance and disconnection, I grappled with the outward appearance of a privileged life and the inward impoverishment of abandonment. My bewilderment was compounded by my parents’ ability to sacrifice everything and inability to talk about it. They warned me not to tell our neighbours, teachers, and friends, insisting that “outsiders” wouldn’t understand our situation. As an adult, I researched the phenomenon of astronaut families. I found scholarly texts but few first-person narratives, despite the countless numbers of astronaut families and “parachute kids” tucked into respectable neighbourhoods across Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. Many misconceptions exist about us, from model minorities to spoiled brats who race fancy cars and live in McMansions. My research led me to write a book. Initially, I thought it would be a collection of voices, so I lined up multiple interviews of astronaut parents and children—but one by one, they withdrew with vague excuses like “it’s hard to remember” or “I don’t know how to talk about it.” I realized then that it was finally time to tell my story, to share what it was like to navigate the wilderness of freedom and isolation, privilege and privation, struggle and survival. I hope that The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street can spark new conversations—both within astronaut families and among the communities around them.
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Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho has published short stories and personal essays in PRISM international, Ricepaper Magazine, River Teeth, Room and several anthologies, and was a finalist for the 2021 Jim Wong-Chu Award for Emerging Writers (presented by the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop). She lives in North Vancouver, BC, where she likes to grow Asian vegetables in her front yard. The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street is her first book.
Natalie Southworth author of There’s Always More to Say (Linda Leith Publishing, March 2026)
I wrote short stories over a number of years, but I hadn’t a book in mind. I published in literary journals knowing I wanted my stories out in the world in some way. It was only when I knew better what my stories were about — what has been an enduring challenge — that I thought ah ha, I might have a book!
I’ve always read more short fiction than anything else. I remember one of the first stories I read, “A Visit of Charity,” by Eudora Welty. Reading that story, like so many that have come after, was like walking down a narrowing passageway, turning down one dark corner after another before arriving at a small room only for everything to be flipped upside down yet somehow remain true.
When I worked as a reporter, there was much I observed and felt that couldn’t be written in the format of daily news. I have to think that limitation had something to do with why I turned to fiction. Although, before I made this turn, I tried my hand at literary non-fiction, thinking it would satiate whatever hunger was growing within me. It didn’t. So, almost with a sense that I couldn’t put it off anymore, I started to work on a story.
That first story, “Spectacular,” is in my new collection and explores how a preteen’s extreme and growing thinness is met less with concern from the community around her than with a sense that she is triumphing. In that story, the narrator is a voyeur and the reader, by extension, might experience being one too. The story differs in approach to the other stories in the collection, but each one explores or experiments in its own way with structure, tense, or voice. What connects them is theme; characters striving for what they think they should want and the costs that arise at the other end.
The characters in “There’s Always More to Say,” like all of us, are trying to get by in a hyper individualistic world and have bought in, at some point, to its offerings and promises. In many ways the stories represent an open dialogue between “winners” and “losers” and what we tell ourselves about these ideas. When I wrote the stories, this navigation wasn’t conscious or intentional, but it’s probably why I wrote them.
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Natalie Southworth‘s short stories have appeared in literary journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. They have won The Brighton Prize, placed third in The Moth Short Story Prize, and were finalists for The Fish Prize, The New Quarterly‘s Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and Prairie Fire‘s McNally Robinson Booksellers Short Fiction Contest. Originally from England, she lives in Montreal with her husband and children.
